Of late, I’ve been doing a lot of work for big international brands with coast to coast dealer networks.

If you’re a manufacturer, say of cars, and a consumer has a terrible dealer experience for which you receive a 1-star Yelp review, what recourse do you have? What if it wasn’t just one review, but dozens or hundreds? After all, you didn’t sell or service the car.

On the other hand, what if you are dealer and, unbeknownst to you, you take delivery of a ‘lemon’ and as a result of selling that ‘lemon’ to a consumer, you receive a swarm of negative reviews on your Yelp, Google, Facebook, DealerRater, and Cars.com pages. What if that ‘lemon’ was caused by a defective part impacting dozens of vehicles you leased or sold? After all, you didn’t manufacture the car.

The issue here is that the consumer (good, bad, or indifferent) doesn’t always know who to credit or blame for their experience. In the case of the brand, which is often the primary driver for a consumer purchase, the manufacturer is the ultimate neck to choke. The manufacturer is perceived to have deep pockets and an overarching desire to protect the brand they’ve spent so much time and money to build.

We’ve all seen what one misstep captured in a viral video can do to brand value.

This blog will focus on the challenge from the manufacturers perspective and I’ll take on the dealer view in a future installment (though, if you’re a dealer, read on, as you may pick up some nifty tidbits).

Let’s start by examining where most consumers get their reviews according to a Bright Local survey:

​Now let’s look at where dealers of a large national brand are focusing their efforts. This data was gathered from the reviews sites of over 50 dealerships nationwide:

Do you see any disconnects here? How about the over emphasis on Yelp reviews or how the dealerships ignore BBB altogether? BBB may not be the hippest reviews site on the internet, but according to Bright Local, it still comprises 15% of all ‘trusted’ reviews searches. Yellow Pages is 10% of trusted reviews search and represents 0% of the reviews for over 50 dealers! Facebook is 20% of reviews search, but only 12% of dealer reviews. Google isn’t off by much (16% vs 13%), but still 19% below target.

As a brand, your reputation is everything. That’s why you can slap Jeep, Polaroid, Rolex, General Electric, etc on anything and people will buy it. It’s all about trust.

When you allow a dealer to use your brand, consumers expect the same quality as if they bought it directly from you. If your dealer has a 3.5 rating on Yelp, you have a 3.5 on Yelp, and visa versa. You and your dealer network are in the same boat and have a common goal – provide the consumer with the best experience so they will be inclined to share that experience with others in person and online.

Only they don’t, at least not without some encouragement.

As I’ve written many times before, angry customers are 11-13x more likely to leave a review than a happy one. Thus, your brand and those representing it already have the deck stacked against them.

Look at this sample data taken from a subset the dealers in this study. Notice how their reviews focus is literally all over the place:

Some throw everything they have at Yelp while others are Facebook fanatics while still others drive all of their reviews to sites that didn’t even get an honorable mention in Bright Local’s survey. Worse, most pay Google short shrift.Same for the star ratings:

How can a one dealer have 5 stars on Google and a single star on Yelp while another has zero Yelp or Google reviews but five stars on Facebook?

This is a simple lack of standardization, and if it goes on too long, your brand will suffer.

I imagine a time very soon when brands will standardize on SAAS based reputation management platforms and include specific instructions in their branding guidelines favoring some reviews sites over others, provide best practices for replying to public online feedback, and even mandate the use of their selected platform.

An added benefit of standardization is the ability to police the dealers in a single interface across the universe of reviews sites and take proactive action before negative reviews get out of hand:

Until this happens, manufacturers and brands will be magnets for negative online reviews when dealers are unable to satisfy customers. Tools like NetPromoter Score only go so far toward accomplishing these goals.​Most customers will say one thing on a survey and quite another online as this TripAdvisor survey demonstrates:

Plus, your prospects don’t read your net-promoter score on Yelp, they just scan for one-star reviews to see what can possibly go wrong if they do business with you or one of your brand ambassadors. Most consumers wouldn’t know what a net-promoter score was if it rear-ended them in a parking lot.

Your goals as a brand are to standardize online reviews management, collect and direct those reviews to the places where they have the most impact, build a reputation hedge around yourself and your brand ambassadors, use negative feedback to improve your business, and do this all before you competitors figure it out.

Based on the calls I’m receiving, if you’re reading this, you’re already late to the party. Time to make reputation standardization a priority.

According to a recent Seeking Alpha article, 95% of CEOs surveyed believe corporate reputation plays an important or very important role in achievement of business objectives, yet knowing this, only 19% of these same executives had a formal system in place for influencing or measuring their reputation.

So, we can all agree that our brand is very important to the success of our business, but how many of us are taking proactive, concrete steps to ensure that we have a seat at the online reputation table where our voice can be heard? According to Seeking Alpha, only 1 in 5 of us. The other 80% are allowing often anonymous internet participants to craft their brand narrative without their input!

Does your company respond to online reviews (good, bad, or indifferent)? When your company takes the time to provide thoughtful and balanced responses to online criticism, doing so will often reflect positively on your brand, as will taking the time to say ‘Thank you’ for a positive review. Internet searchers seeking your products or services will choose to do business with companies that not only have good reviews, but will favor those who interact with those leaving feedback, especially in regard to negative reviews.

Having a seat at the online reputation table means that you are in the mosh pit with your customers, employees, ex-employees, and competitors engaged in conversation with the purpose of making sure your future prospects receive a fair and balance brand narrative - not a one-sided diatribe.

Since unhappy customers are 11-13x more likely to leave reviews, not having a seat at the table tips the tables against your business, by default. In addition to engaging with your reviewers in the public sphere, you also need to make it simple and easy for your happy clients to share their feedback. This is what I have coined as collection and direction.

What are these terms? Collection is simple enough to understand. This is the act of asking your clients to leave you a review, say on Facebook, so others may share in their positive experience with your company. If you are already asking, but not getting the results you desire, then you are not making it easy enough for them to leave reviews (see what I did there?). Direction is deciding where you would like these little nuggets of brand gold to go. Do you need more reviews on Google, Facebook, Yelp, Zillow, TripAdvisor, SolarReviews, DealerRater, etc? Again, the easier you make this for your clients, the better the result.

For example, you can ask, “Hey, would you mind leaving me a review on DealerRater.com?” or you can do that AND follow it up with a text message or email with the link to DealerRater’s review page for your dealership. Adding this simple follow-up step will improve your results and online reputation dramatically.

Direction is not itself a static exercise, in fact, where reviews are being directed needs constant review and revision. I just completed an analysis for a large manufacturer who was concerned about how its dealer network was handling online reviews. The study demonstrated inherent directional biases, with some dealerships throwing everything they had at Yelp, while others were all in on Facebook, and most basically ignored Google (wasting a huge opportunity to impress with the largest and most prominent real estate on the first page of Google’s search results).

It’s also important to know that Google’s algorithm is trying its best to provide the searcher with ‘the most relevant’ results. Directing reviews to a single site will make this site more prominent in search (which is good), but the more you spread the love around, the more positive review sites will begin to populate page one of Google and most especially in the ever-important area ‘above the fold’ e.g. top 4-5 results.

Google’s own data shows that 67% of the clicks happen within the first four search results and 93% of searchers never look past the first page. By spreading reviews around to multiple sites and interacting with and responding to those reviews, Google’s algorithm ‘learns’ that these sites are ‘more relevant’ and begins to prioritize them.

This is what I call owning your page one search results. High value SEO content, backlinking, paid traffic, and other tactics work as well, but none are as cheap and easy as collecting lots of reviews and sprinkling them (with intention) to review sites that are important to your potential prospects.Thus, it’s important to dial in the direction piece before wiring up the collection and reporting software.

In closing, gone are the days when businesses and their marketing departments could sit back and create brand narrative in a vacuum and expect the public to simply accept it. Today, smart business leaders are engaged in the conversation and have a seat at the table in co-crafting their brand narrative.​Which are you? The 20% that have/do or the 80% that have/do not? As your competitors pile into the 20%, where will that leave your business?

While the term Ivy League has connotations of academic excellence, selectivity in admissions, and social elitism, it began as an athletic conference comprising sports teams from eight private universities in the Northeastern United States. The eight members of the Ivy League are Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Yale University.

Since the Ivy League is often considered to be the pinnacle of academic achievement, I thought it would be fun to rank these schools as a shopper might rank other businesses on that most confounding of review sites – Yelp. I’ll also feature each university’s most inane 1 or 2-star review. Yes, even Ivy League schools receive 1-star reviews, as crazy as that sounds, since there’s just no pleasing some people. Yelp also scrubs reviews for these prestigious institutions, though at a lower rate than for other business segments I’ve studied. Go figure.

The purpose of this blog is to point fun at the review process in general by basing each school’s brand narrative on a single bad review, written by folks who in some cases didn’t even attend the school they are reviewing.

1. Dartmouth College – Yelp rating – 4.5 stars (Zero 1-star reviews)Favorite 2-star review quote (since there were no 1 star reviews – yay, Dartmouth!): “But what made it truly unbearable is that every bit of pain and ridiculousness was intensified due to the fact there is nothing in Hanover except for Dartmouth College and therefore nowhere to escape… Good thing the college had universally convenient access to alcohol when I needed it… Two stars, because at least Dartmouth Dining Services had good food. :-\”That food saved Dartmouth from receiving its only 1-star review! Go dining services!

2. Princeton University – Yelp rating – 4.5 stars (only a single 1 star review)Favorite 1-star review quote – “Ask yourself whether tearing down others is the best way to get a leg up in the world.”Apparently, according to this reviewer, if you go to Princeton, yes, it is.No wonder Alexander Hamilton ditched Princeton for Kings College (Columbia).

3. Columbia University – Yelp rating – 4.5 stars (wayyyyyyyy overrated)Favorite 1-star review quote: “This school has some of the most arrogant staff and equally arrogant students. I was accepted here and declined after one visit. I was excited after having heard such good things about this school but once I spoke to students and staff, it became very clear that I was mistaken. DO NOT GO HERE!! It's wayyy overrated, overpriced, and not worth it.”Wrote the reviewer who didn’t actually attend Columbia. Perhaps a review by Alexander Hamilton would set the record straight.

5. Brown University – Yelp rating – 4 stars (after all, it’s still Ivy League)Favorite 1-star review quote: “A wonderful place to walk around if you are scouting out the lowest degree of hedonism, bad language and non-fashion and class. But be sure not to walk around after dark or one of Providence's sanctuary city criminals might cut your throat to grab your wallet to b{u}y drugs that are freely available around the neighborhood. Other than all of the above, it still is Ivy League.”Well, at least it’s still Ivy League. Can’t take that away from Brown! And apparently it has fantastically easy access to illicit drugs – hippies unite!

6. Harvard University – Yelp rating – 4 stars (too much of the wrong kind of grass)Favorite 1-star review quote – “It's physically unattractive and there's an atmosphere of snootiness there. Well, none of this is funny. It's meant to be a serious criticism. And apparently, I heard you're not allowed to go on the grass. That defeats the whole purpose of having nice grass.”Yes, it does! Grass is meant to be enjoyed! Bad on you, Harvard. Boooo!

7. University of Pennsylvania – Yelp rating – 4 stars (for perceived criminal element)Favorite 1-star review quote – “If folks realized how much crime took place within the Penn community, maybe they'd be more scared of their hallmates than of walking down Walnut Street after dark.”Only white-collar crime, I hope! I have to admit, kinda scared of Penn grads now…

8. Yale University – Yelp rating – 4 stars (most 1-star reviews of Ivy League)Favorite 2-star review quote (Yale had the most 1 star reviews of all Ivy League Schools, but I found this 2-star quote to be the best – “Three little words: grade inflation! amen!”Yes, Amen, indeed! Nothing like putting a bunch of nerdy overachievers on a grading curve so they can pass their classes. Ha!

Well, there you have it. When considering Ivy League schools for your overachieving nerd of a kid, the choice is clear – Dartmouth College for its lack of single star reviews courtesy of Dining Services. Of course, if your kid is on the lazy side of overachieving, Yale’s grade inflation can’t be beat!

So, if you’re business grappling with Yelp and it’s mysterious algorithm and are hoping beyond hope that someday you, too, will have 5 stars, feel secure in the fact that even this great nation’s most esteemed universities can’t catch a break on Yelp.

When describing what I do to friends, prospects, and fellow business networkers, I’m often confronted with confused looks as folks try to reconcile two seemingly different business challenges: business process optimization (aka – CRM) and reputation (or online reviews) management and why or how I would propose to tackle both of these for my customers.

The purpose of my first blog of the new year is to describe how these two business functions are related and why they are best managed together using online software platforms.

Let’s start with online reviews management. The most obvious challenge in this area is something called Yelp and the dozens of spinoff and lookalike sites it has spawned. In fact, online reviews have become so popular with shoppers (of everything from gadgets to home improvements) that Google and Facebook have jumped into the fray. Depending on what you read, 9 in 10 consumers now consult online reviews before making a purchasing decision.

Today the internet is abuzz with consumer experiences that most often modulate between angry 1 star and exuberant 5 star reviews with more thoughtful (and useful) 3 and 4 star experiences sprinkled in sparingly as a too underutilized counterpoint to the extremes on both sides.

I often start with my clients by discussing reviews management because it’s often symptomatic of larger business process issues present in the organization. For example, if there is a preponderance of customers complaining about ‘lack of communication’, ‘scheduling’, ‘multiple trips to resolve’ something, ‘unresponsiveness’, etc, we have an informed starting point to delve into those challenges.

In reviewing what’s out there on the internet, I spend the most time with the 3 & 4 star reviews as I’ve found these to be the most useful and constructive and the least emotionally charged (and as a result, most factually accurate).

In theory, if we can fix these issues (with email automation, better calendaring & dispatch, training & inventory on trucks, or weeding out a bad apple or two, etc), then we should see a commensurate raise in star ratings overall, but there can be a significant lag between the two.

As I’m sure you’re aware, fixing these issues takes analysis, planning, and often software implementation and adoption. The process can take months, so the reviews will lag the effort by an equal amount, so we need some way to solicit more reviews from happy customers (who are less likely to leave reviews than unhappy ones) while we are optimizing and automating the backend.

This is where reviews management can jump start online ratings and begin to bring in more customers as the operational components are brought into alignment to:

Better service and delight existing clients or client load

Build a stronger foundation to propel revenue growth beyond limitations of the previous system

Since each bad review you’ve received has cost you clients (whether you know it or not), you can’t afford to have a bevy of them crop up as you’re trying to fix and optimize your deficiencies. You need more revenue to address these problems properly, not less! After all, you’re investing in software, process automation, consulting services, etc to get all of this done.

It’s quite simple, really. If you just do reviews management, but don’t fix the underlying problems, at best, your reputation will tread water. If you fix the problems, but don’t engage more of your satisfied customers to share their experiences, your business could suffer from a cash crunch that is difficult to recover from as the negative reviews keep rolling in.

Interestingly, what I’ve discovered is that companies with average to high online star ratings are far more likely to engage me to assist with reviews management than one with low star ratings who would benefit the most. The former are also more likely to engage me to assist with operations and CRM as they are always looking for ways to continually improve their customer experience and efficiency.

More customers and better efficiency equal higher profits. As a result, well run companies have more money to invest in the very things that made them successful in the first place – like process, training, and automation.

So, in summary, online reputation is often symptomatic of acute operational issues that are most easily addressed with CRM and business process solutions that in turn feed online reputation, but one needn’t delay in the repair of one while actively addressing the other. A holistic approach is the most effective long term solution.​There you have it.

In working with clients from across the country in a number of industries, I’ve noticed that regardless of business model, customer segment, or other apparent differences, all businesses face similar threats to their online reputations.

These threats add complexity to the already difficult reviews management challenges facing businesses today and come from entities that are both familiar and surprising. Regardless of where they originate, one star reviews can scare off prospects and even cause longtime customers to question their loyalty.

​With that, here are the Top 5 Online Review Threats:

1. Unhappy Customers

There’s nothing like stating the obvious. You may be thinking, ‘tell me something I don’t already know.’ But consider this – unhappy customers are 11x more likely to leave a review than happy ones. Therefore, if you don’t have countermeasures in place (like a review management software platform for example), unhappy customers can swamp your online reputation.

Counteract this threat by consistently asking your happy customers to leave reviews and directing them with live links to review sites that matter to you, like Google and Facebook which are both rapidly eclipsing Yelp as the go to for customers seeking reputable companies.

Also, working with unhappy clients to turn them around is critically important. A 1-star review that is later updated to a 4-star review because you ‘made it right’ is gold and will win you even more customers who now know that you take customer service seriously.

2. Ex-Employees

Disgruntled ex-employees are a double threat. Not only can they leave unflattering reviews on Yelp, Google, and other review sites that cause prospects to think twice before contacting your business, they can also interfere with recruiting efforts. How? By sharing their negative opinions on job sites like Indeed and Glassdoor.

The difficulty here is that whenever someone types ‘your company name’ and the search term ‘reviews’, Glassdoor and Indeed are both top ranking sites. Some potential buyers will consider how you treat your employees before doing business with you while others who don’t view this as important might be swayed by the fictitious 1-star Yelp review they left.

I’ve helped many clients have employee reviews removed from sites like Yelp, but it’s a process and their dirty laundry can sit there for days or weeks before it’s pulled down.

3. Competitors

Not everyone in your industry plays clean, as I’m sure you’re already aware. There are some who believe that if they sully your reputation somehow the universe will send more business their way. Their strategy is simple – drive your star rating lower than theirs.

Unfortunately, while you may suspect which of your competitors is leaving you negative reviews, it’s often very hard to prove. These, like ex-employee reviews, have one important indicator in common – the name of the reviewer doesn’t exist in your CRM database.

The best strategy for fighting these unsavory characters is to make your online reviews unassailable. What I mean by this is that a business with 5-stars, but only 5 reviews, is easily attacked. In this example, a single 1-star review will drop the average to 4.3 while a second will take the average to 3.9 (below the critical 4-star mark!).

A 4.6 rating with 300 reviews is like a castle with a moat, wall, and army protecting it. The barbarian hordes will move on to easier prey.

4. Name Confusion

Does your company’s name sound like a competitor’s? If you, you could accidentally attract some of their negative reviews while they grab some of your positive reviews.

When you actively solicit customer reviews with active review links, you prevent the latter from ever becoming an issue while the former is harder to control. Just as with competitors and ex-employees, the best defense against name confusion is a strong offense.When you proactively build up the defensive ramparts around your reputation, these types of reviews are less impactful and quickly buried while we work to have them removed.

5. Opting out of Reputation Management

With 93% of buyers consulting online reviews before they make a purchasing decision and 78% of internet searches driven by product research, companies who opt out of reputation management do so at a huge cost.

According to Harvard Business Review, each 1/10 of a ‘star point’ equals 1% of gross revenue up or down. According to their research, a company with 4.5 stars will enjoy 10% more top line revenue than a similar business at 3.5 stars, all things being equal.

For most businesses, a 10% increase in revenue is meaningful, particularly if that business comes after overhead has been covered. In other words, this incremental business is often more profitable than your run rate business. When you opt out of reputation and review management (generally by doing nothing), you essentially get what the internet gives you by default, and that can be a very dangerous proposition.

Don’t let your online reputation happen by default at the whims of ex-employees, competitors, and other internet trolls. A strong review management strategy will build a wall around your business’ reputation and make it unassailable to these and other internet threats.

As I work with my clients, I find that many of them make the same mistakes when it comes to managing their online reputation. While there are many strategies available to take control of your reputation from internet bullies and professional extortionists, the purpose of this blog is to educate you about some of the landmines waiting for you as you attempt to do so. Avoiding these is critical to the success of your online reputation strategy.

Responding to All Yelp Reviews

Your Yelp account manager (you know, that person who keeps calling you to advertise) will try to tell you that the faster you respond to Yelp reviews, the better you look to other Yelpers. However, it’s critical that before you respond to any reviews on Yelp, you first assess the reviewer. How many reviews does he/she have? How many friends? How long have they been Yelping? If the answers are less than three, zero, and less than a month, you are far better off waiting 48 – 72 hours to see if Yelp ‘scrubs’ the review. You see, Yelp’s algorithm generally scrubs out ‘non-Yelpers’ – aka people who don’t use Yelp for more than a scathing review or two. If you respond too soon, it may give the review legitimacy and cause it to stick. Only respond quickly to those users who are obvious Yelpers (those with many reviews, friends, etc) and unlikely to be scrubbed. Let the rest marinate for a couple of days and they’ll generally disappear.

A La Carte Reviews Management

With excellent review management platforms like Podium (full disclosure I license Podium to my clients), it no longer makes sense to try to keep up with the growing universe of reviews sites on the internet one-by-one. Managing these sites from one interface and proactively driving your happy customers there will do wonders for your online reputation strategy. A la carte management is both inefficient and prone to internet trolls. Who has time to check a dozen review sites several times a day?

Thinking 5 Stars is Enough

If you have 5 stars (or better than 4 on average) across the universe of reviews sites, you deserve hearty congratulations! But if you mistakenly believe that simply having a high star rating is enough, you are sadly mistaken. Search algorithms are interested in the number of reviews, how recent they are, how many are coming in each month, etc. You may have five stars on Facebook, but if Yelp is getting more and more frequent reviews, it will rank higher in search. The good news is that if you standardize on a reviews platform, you can drive more happy customers to more reviews sites, and if you’re really good, Yelp will get pushed to the dreaded purgatory of Google page 2. Also, the more reviews you have, the tougher it is for a troll to impact your star rating and the sooner their review is buried.

Paying Customers to Leave Reviews

This is a HUGE NO-NO! Yelp has announced a crackdown on this practice and is prepared to slap a consumer warning on your site (like the one above) if it:

Catches you soliciting Yelp reviews

Catches you incentivizing Yelp reviews

Yelp has said it will use elite Yelpers, employees, and others to catch companies red handed. It’s likely that other review sites will follow suit. Plus, happy customers shouldn’t need to be coerced into writing you a nice review.

Making a Reviewer ‘Wrong’

When responding to online reviews, be sure to not only respond to the negative reviews, but more importantly, thank those leaving positive reviews. As tempting as it can be sometimes, never make a reviewer ‘wrong’. Your current and future customers will interpret your response to this unhappy client as the way they can expect to be treated if they were to have a similar experience with your company. Always acknowledge their issue, apologize for their experience, and offer a solution to ‘make it right’. The best reviews you can engender online are negative reviews you turned around and made positive. These will result in more business than generic ‘everything’s unicorns, rainbows, and lollipops’ 5 star reviews which can look suspicious when served in abundance. Future customers appreciate seeing current customers get taken care of the right way when there’s a service or delivery hiccup. Doing the opposite will drive them into your competitor’s waiting arms.

I’m surprised how often the following conversation happens when discussing what I do with potential prospects:

Prospect – “What is it you do exactly?”Me – “I help companies improve their online reputation and operations using cloud based platforms like Podium and Zoho CRM.”Prospect – “What’s CRM?”Me – “Customer Relationship Management, it’s software that helps you automate and track interactions with your customers.”Prospect – “So you do lead management.”Me – “At a very basic level, yes, but there’s so much more…”

While it’s true that many companies begin by using CRM as a lead management system, an enterprise grade CRM platform provides an order of magnitude more capability – and many companies are barely tapping into its potential.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) describes the entire lifecycle of your relationship with your customers. This lifecycle includes the ever important ‘lead stage’ where your sales team works to qualify, pitch, follow-up, and close prospects, and later extends into the ‘deal stage’ where you’ve sold something to a client and now need to deliver it. Finally, it encompasses all the service calls, tickets, remarketing, etc that live in the post-sale phase of your relationship.

As I’ve written about many times before, process is the crucial delineator between companies that scale and those that don’t. Before we continue, let’s define what I mean by process. In my definition of process, the system is so well defined that anyone in your organization (or a new employee) can jump right into any administrative job and pick up where the last person left off.

Therefore, systems need to be encapsulated and indoctrinated in some way. CRM becomes the framework on which we hang our process and systems and make them instantly understandable to all.

Processes that are the same every time can be captured and automated using workflows. The concept here is that the CRM walks employees step by step through each ‘milestone’ ensuring that it is completed in the same way and with the same quality every single time. It includes alerts to managers when tasks are behind schedule or not being completed along with reminders to the responsible parties that today we need to do x, y, and z, in this order, with these priorities.

Using workflows to capture standard procedures provides a consistent and predictable customer experience that often results in higher online ratings and repeat business, as well as, greater employee engagement, retention, and job satisfaction that feeds higher online ratings and repeat business, etc. When used properly, CRM creates a virtuous cycle.

Once we successfully capture process in CRM, we now have the ability to forecast. While forecasting isn’t necessarily ‘seeing’ the future, it can act as a predictive indicator of it.

Think of how you might capture sales process to ensure your sales team is completing all tasks necessary to achieve quota attainment. To accomplish this, we must know which activities lead to sales results. I call this ‘knowing your numbers’. It’s comprised of how many calls, presentations, follow-ups, etc are needed to close a single deal. We then work backwards to figure the daily activities required by each sales person. The real trick is monitoring and enforcing these activity levels to drive consistency.

For example, you may need ten leads to book four appointments to close one deal. Once we know this, we can capture all sales related activities in CRM and measure how well individuals on the sales team are complying with the numbers.

Here things get interesting. If a sales person is doing everything they are required to do and still not hitting their numbers, we may have a training issue, have made a bad hire, or discover he/she is fishing in the wrong pond. On the other hand, if they aren’t completing the activities, we know they aren’t going to make it long before we have to report quarterly results, and can take appropriate action now.

We’ll also be able to see those who are doing more than required, those who are achieving better than average results, etc. The point is that we now have forward visibility. In other words, we are no longer running our business by looking at it in the rear-view mirror.

Think of how far you would get driving your car if you did so solely by referring to the data presented by your rearview mirror (a lagging indicator). How far do you think you’d get before you hit something? Interestingly, many business owners drive their companies this way. They use lagging indicators to measure their business and wonder why they’re not getting anywhere or in never ending ‘firefighting’ mode.

CRM, used properly, can be transformative. It can assist with marketing campaigns, sales activities, customer service, procurement, delivery, social media interactions, email parsing, calendaring, resource management, and myriad other critical business processes and activities.

If you’re currently running your business off a spreadsheet or using a system that provides only lead management features, chances are you are putting an artificial ceiling on your own growth prospects.

True CRM is more than lead management, it’s customer and employee management. It’s an eye toward what’s coming down that road at us and the staircase that brings our company to ever higher levels of achievement.

It seems that today, unlike at any other point in history, everything thing our company has ever done – good, bad, or indifferent – is alive and well on the internet.

Remember that pain in the neck, no matter how much you bent over backwards, there was no making him happy, customer? Well, even if you don’t, the internet does, and his one-sided story about how you failed to execute on the even simplest tasks is being scrutinized by prospective clients as you read this blog.

How about that ex-employee you terminated for cause three years ago for stealing money out of the register or making inappropriate advances on other employees. Well, he’s still holding a grudge and just left you a fake review on Yelp that is sticking for some reason (probably because you’re not currently paying Yelp) and he followed that gem up with a maniacal diatribe on Glassdoor (don’t know what this is? Time you found out) to scare away potential new hires.

Then there’s your unethical competitor that mistakenly believes that if he slanders your business, the universe will somehow send more of it his way. His strategy? Write a bunch of fake reviews that drive your star rating lower than his so he becomes the default choice of internet searchers.Lastly, there is the statistic that unhappy customers are 11x more likely to share their negative experience both in person and online than happy ones.

I have a client who recently discovered that an ex-employee, who was fired for cause, not only set up his Google Local page, but left a horrendous 1 star review, and locked him, the business owner, out of the his own Google site! He’s currently fighting with Google to regain control of this critical asset.

The fact is that most businesses do not have a reputation strategy in place to manage and mitigate these and other threats that have a material impact on their companies. Even if they do, it’s usually a hodge podge typically consisting of monetary bribes to customers to leave reviews on specified sites that receives little in the way of tracking or follow-up.

So as a business, what are you supposed to do? Sit around and let the fake and negative reviews stack up as your customers race for the exits?

Not at all.

The first step would be to implement a console where you can collect, monitor, and respond to reviews across the universe of sites where they are accumulating. Consolidating this vast array of internet properties in one easy to use interface is critical if you are to get your hands around the problem. The alternative is to monitor them all separately. This is both inefficient, time consuming, and truthfully, will fall through the cracks in most organizations.

Next, this reviews platform should allow you and your employees to ask satisfied customers for reviews in an intuitive and non-threatening way. The preferred medium is via SMS text messaging which enjoys a 99% open rate, versus email which generally clocks in at under 20%.

The messages you send should:

Thank your customer for doing business with you

Direct them to the reviews sites you deem most strategic to your company

Thank them for leaving a review

The review management software must have a piece of code that allows the reviews section of your website (www.yourcompany.com/reviews) to update automatically as you collect new reviews through the system. Setting up this page on your domain allows you to get some serious SEO juice for the search term – your name & reviews.

Finally, when selecting a review management system, employee metrics such as who is soliciting reviews, the quality of the reviews they are collecting, and which sites they are going to allows for enterprise wide adoption to build a deep and wide moat around your online reputation that discourages fake competitive and disgruntled employee reviews.

In closing, remember that 93% of customers will hesitate to do business with your company if you have under 4 stars on any of the major reviews sites. Even if you currently have 5 stars, but only a few overall reviews, it just takes a couple of bad ones to drag your star rating down into the mud.

Your online reputation is an important brand asset. Reputation management is revenue insurance.

As part of my Podium practice, I work with many clients who are grappling with online reputation challenges (see my recent piece on quadrant 2 activities). Many are baffled at their low online reputation scores and cite hundreds if not thousands of “happy” and “repeat” customers as the proof that they run solid, reputable businesses. Yet, even with this repeat business (the holy grail for most companies), they struggle to grow revenue and profits at the pace they would like. They find themselves stuck on a hamster wheel.

Whenever I begin to peel back the onion and look more deeply into these companies’ internal processes, I find that they are correct in all regards. They do, in fact, run solid, reputable businesses that truly care about their customers and do quality work, and they are concurrently stagnant. So, what’s the deal?

At issue here, is the bully pulpit of the internet. While these legitimate businesses do indeed have lots of happy customers, they are not actively soliciting any of them for online reviews by driving them to top customer review sites like Yelp, Google, Facebook, Houzz, among myriad others.

Here’s what business owners are up against: unhappy customers are 11x more likely to leave online reviews to “warn” other consumers about their bad experience so they may avoid a similar fate. As if that weren’t a tough enough item to deal with, competitors are also more likely to leave your business reviews than happy customers, and their reviews, in large part, tend to be unflattering attempts to drive existing and potential customers away from your business and (hopefully) to theirs.

Of course, while many of these spurious reviews read as if they were written by non-customers, they still impact the star rating potential clients see when they type “your name” plus “reviews” into Google.

If your star rating is below the magic number ‘4’ on any of the major reviews engines, 93% of consumers will hesitate to contact your business. Additionally, they are subsequently unlikely to dive any deeper than what they see on the first page of Google. They simply move on to the next 4+ star competitor they find (oft assisted by a Google Map, replete with star ratings, listing you along with your top two competitors – thus, this prospects work is done for them).

To make matters worse, there’s a third group of co-conspirators who wish to drag your business through the mud in a public forum: your disgruntled former employees. Again, these unsavory and disingenuous individuals can do significant harm to your reputation if you take your eye of the reputation ball. Some will wait months or even years to inflict their particular style of brand damage, as revenge is a dish best served cold (and the longer they wait, the less likely they are to be caught).​Thus, with the three major threats constantly looming (unhappy customers, competitors, and ex-employees), it is imperative that your business devise an online reputation strategy and empower it with the latest technology to drive more happy customers to leave reviews where they matter.

Because it’s not only your star rating that matters, but the total number of reviews you’ve amassed.Consider this, you may have a 5 star rating on Google or Yelp (if so, congratulations!), but if you have a low number of reviews, that 5 star rating is very much at risk.

For example, if you have 5 stars, but only 5 total reviews on the site, the following could happen in a very short period of time:

A single one star review will drop you from a 5 to a 4.3

A second one star review will drop you from a 4.3 to a 3.9

In this example, you are a mere two reviews away from dropping below the magical 4 star threshold.Just two negative reviews and suddenly, 93% of customers hesitate to contact you!

We call this your Reviews Risk Factor. A reviews risk factor is determined by the total number of reviews needed to take your current rating (assuming it’s above 4 stars), to a sub-four star rating. The lower the number, the higher the risk. In the above example, this company’s Review Risk Factor is 2.

On the other hand, a company with a lower star rating, say 4.3, that has 100 reviews looks like this:

First 1 star review does nothing

Second 1 star review reduces to 4.2 stars

It will take 12 consecutive 1 star reviews to drop below 4 stars (3.9) – A risk factor of 12

When we use this same example with 5 stars and 100 reviews, it takes 36 consecutive 1 star reviews to breach the 4-star mark! This is a risk factor of 36 – a much safer number and something you should be striving for!

Therefore, the solution is to get more happy customers to leave more reviews more often, so that any ‘star impacts’ a negative review causes will be increasingly muted over time.

As you get more reviews, this strategy has the knock on effect of disincentivizing additional negative reviews (particularly from competitors and former employees) as their individual contributions to your overall star rating seemingly have no effect. Since their goal is to get your star rating to drop, the more reviews you collect and distribute across the various customer reviews sites, the harder this goal is to achieve, so they’ll often leave you alone and seek out easier prey.

In sum, the fewer reviews you have, regardless of star rating, the more impactful each new review is. This impact diminishes as more reviews are collected. If you have a high star rating and a low number of reviews, you need to get started building your moat with feature rich reviews management software.

If you have low stars (anything under ‘4’) and a lot of reviews, it’ll be a bit of a climb out of the hole you’re in, but again, with the right strategy and a little time (6-12 months), you’ll be amazed at your change in online reputation fortunes and begin reaping the benefits of more customers and higher profits. Unfortunately, the longer you wait, the deeper the hole and the steeper the climb out.

Writing blogs, like this one, is a Quadrant 2 activity. Sure, we all know that we need to write more blogs to promote our businesses, but we just never seem to get around to it. The same is true for a lot of things that move the needle: process improvement (we’ve always done it this way), networking (who has time for that?), training, strategic planning, preparation, and prevention (see preparation).

While all of these are important to the long-term success of any business, they are not jumping up and down screaming for immediate attention like the latest customer mishap or the missed shipment. Now everyone is pulling their hair out. Make no mistake, that customer mishap and missed shipment were first seeded in Quadrant 2.

Quadrant 1Quadrant 1 is Urgent and Important. I like to call this the ‘firefighting’ quadrant. This is where all your angry customers, dropped balls, deadline driven projects (which generally start as quadrant 2 initiatives but transform themselves into Quadrant 1 fires via procrastination), and crises live. While some crises are inevitable, much of the noise and confusion resident in Quadrant 1 is self-inflicted. They are the result of a lack of preparation, planning, relationship building, etc that became the sparks that ignited the fire you and your teams are now fighting.

Quadrant 3Yeah, I know I’m skipping Quadrant 2, but indulge me for a moment. I promise I’ll come back to it. Quadrant 3 consists of tasks, interruptions, meetings, and emails (other communications) that are Urgent but Not Important. They are typically items that are urgent for others, but not important to you or what you need to accomplish. Let’s face it, most email we receive is some CYA info piece sent to maintain a paper trail.

Simply schedule time for email and blast through it. Never loiter in your inbox! I check mine 3x a day for 10 minutes each:

Morning

Noon

Night

​The problem with Quadrant 3 is that, to the untrained eye, it can look a lot like Quadrant 1. Unable to discern the difference, many executives and employees toil away in Quadrant 3 under the illusion that they are accomplishing something, when, in fact, they are not. It’s a ruse. It’s busy work. Nothing more, and it sure as hell doesn’t move the needle. At all. Ever. You can hit it out of the park in Quadrant 3, and the points don't count.

If your work feels unrewarding, this is probably why.

Quadrant 4How much time do you spend each day checking Facebook? Instagram? Twitter? Unless you’re in the marketing department and running campaigns in these media (like this blog post), bopping around in social media is a complete waste of time. Yet, many of us spend hours a day checking up on the latest baby photos and enviously perusing some long lost high school friend’s latest European vacation galleries.

Quadrant 4 is the dimension of the time suck. The things that live here are neither urgent nor important. It’s social media, binge watching, and otherwise procrastinating.

Unfortunately for many people, Quadrant 4 is an entertaining distraction, and therefore, alluring. Quadrant 4 is where we go when we are weary of the world around us and need a break or we simply don’t know what to do with ourselves. Quadrant 4 is where overtime in Quadrant 1 will send us.​Quadrant 2While the action items that inhabit Quadrant 2 are important (the most important over the long term, I’d argue), they are not urgent, therefore, most companies never get around to executing on them.

The result? Executives and employees are embroiled in the maelstrom of Quadrant 1, with requisite Quadrant 3 bleed over (since most can’t tell the difference between the two anyway). Quadrant 4 thus becomes the place where they take a break from the ‘action’. Meanwhile, Quadrant 2 remains on the back burner, constantly getting kicked down the road, until it finally falls off everyone’s radar. A victim of Quadrant 1 exhaustion.

Then, the shit hits the fan. Quadrant 1 is boiling over. Customers are screaming. Employees bail and burnout. Morale plummets and no one can see a way out. You’re behind with your vendors. Your credit’s getting yanked out from under you. BK.

In the movie version, a charismatic and visionary hero steps up, unites the employees, comes to terms with the creditors (or raises a ton of money), and saves the town.

In life, that visionary is Quadrant 2 and the people focused there.

Ignoring Quadrant 2 in your business is like building a rocket only to discover that no one thought to build a launch pad to go with it.

The result are:

The rocket doesn’t fly as high as you’d like

The rocket doesn’t fly in the direction you’d like

The rocket explodes during or soon after launch

Any combination of the above

​The launch pad does several things for the rocket, but most important are:

A launch pad counters the rocket’s thrust so it can push off the ground

It provides stability for the engines to achieve full thrust

It provides infrastructure for fueling and outfitting the rocket

Yet many companies that approach me for help have already launched the rocket, often in the wrong direction (or several directions at once – I call these squirrel chasers), at a low altitude, and without enough fuel for the journey.

If we are early enough in the process we can often correct the trajectory and perform an aerial refueling exercise, but both of these are time intensive and expensive. Of course, the longer a company waits to get back on course, the more complicated and expensive the eventual fix. The irony is that the shallow trajectory of their business often isn’t throwing off enough cash to bring in consultants to get Quadrant 2 strategy formulated and executed.

And that is where we consultants live – Quadrant 2. When you hire us for strategic direction that’s Quadrant 2, so is fixing most of your HR issues. That angry customer call is likely due to a process that is inconsistent or undocumented, as is the missed deadline, prolific margin bleed, and the resulting lack of profitability. If you are running your business off a spreadsheet, Quadrant 2 trouble is likely brewing.

Some companies think they can outrun Quadrant 2 by selling more, faster. While the rocket may fly higher, when it crashes, it crashes a lot harder and hurts a lot more people (employees, customers, and vendors). That rocket burns way too much fuel (cash) way too fast (cash burn) and is housed in an ineffective design that could explode long before it runs out of gas.

Quadrant 1 is where heart attacks, burnout, and customer churn happen. It’s how your competitors outmaneuver you. They’re in 2 and you’re in 1, 3, & 4 because you don't make time for 2.

Fortunately, a strong and consistent focus on Quadrant 2 not only moves the needle across the organization, the more time we and our teams spend here, the less time we spend in Quadrant 1 (unplanned crisis mitigation & overdue projects).